Chapter 4
What Grin remembers next hurts the most. But before he remembers next, Grin sees his best friend Ballad. Only Ballad is covered in silver—more appropriately, he is made of silver.
Ballad stands in the middle of a darkness. The shadows seem to pulse with something like a bad imitation of life. They move, they want, they hunger—but they do not live. Ballad is in trouble. Ballad is in danger of being consumed by the shadows. His skin is armor.
Skin is the the largest human organ. The largest human organ is a shield. Skin is a shield, but the largest human organ is not enough to protect Ballad from the shadows.
“You must seek the Elder,” Ballad tells Grin. “Everything is lost if you do not find the Elder.”
“Where should I look for him?” Grin asks, afraid of the shadows.
“Not him. Her,” Ballad says. “The Elder will tell you what you are afraid to know.”
Grin swallows. “I’ll find her, but I’m not leaving you here.”
Ballad turns, stares into Grin’s eyes. “You have to.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Grin says, his jaw clenched. “This is my dream. And I won’t let you be eaten by shadows!”
With that, Grin’s body becomes lightness—and the shadows recoil. The brightness is beyond Grin’s control. His skin burns. His heart races. He breathes shallow.
Grin’s waking self borders on consciousness. His eyes take in light from between slat blinds. He sees the whiteness of the pillow. Grin grabs this whiteness and pulls his waking self back into the Dream.
The cold darkness that lurked around Ballad has peeled back. Ballad and Grin stand on a cliff, in the noon sun, in a forested part of Southern California. They stare at an arrowhead carved into the side of a mountain. Ballad turns his head, looks at Grin. He laughs a little.
“So this is what you can do,” he states.
“No, it’s what we all can. The question is if we can bring this to the Wake.” Grin sighs.
Ballad turns to face Grin straight on. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” he asks.
Grin shrugs. “I don’t know. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to know. All I know is that I’m supposed to find out. And you told me what the first step has to be.”
Ballad nods. “Find the Elder. She will know what happens next.”
Grin nods. “Well,” he says, “I guess we should get going.”
The two of them take in the landscape. A fast river flows at the foot of their mountain. On the other side, a chainlink fence. Inside the fence, a box. On the shore, a wooden dock. Beyond the fence, a path of caked earth and stone.
Ballad looks around. “Grin—“
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think I get to go with you.” As he says these words, his silver skin falls off. It doesn’t shed—it just falls away, like it never was. And Ballad, now exposed to the dangers of the Dream, falls to his knees and gasps for breath. He clutches the dirt.
“Ballad!” Grin runs over to him, but Ballad falls sideways, rolls down the mountain.
“BALLAD!”
Grin jumps from the mountain and lands with a crash on the shore of the river. Even though the ground is flat, Ballad slides into the water.
Grin dives in, grabs Ballad’s limp shoulder. “Breathe,” Grin whispers. And Ballad gasps.
“I have to get you out of here,” Grin says. Ballad looks around, confused.
“Where am—Ale—” Ballad starts to say, his eyes full of recognition.
“Don’t name me here!” Grin snaps. “I have to get you out of here, Ballad. Now.”
“Ballad?” the man Grin holds says. “Who? What are you talking about? Where am I?”
“Here, you are Ballad. Here is Dream. I guess you’re not an imprint after all,” Grin says. “Which begs the question, how are you here?”
Ballad looks very scared. “I—I—what the hell?”
“Wake up, Ballad. Become your waking self,” Grin says, and with that, Ballad disappears.
Grin looks around. He sees an alligator on the dock, feels a shark brush his leg, sees a bear eating a human on the path he needs to take.
“Everything has to start somewhere else,” Grin says with a sigh. “Here is as good as any other somewhere else.”
And he swims. And he clambers onto the dock, hops over the fence, watches the shark and the alligator fight, and then watches the bear eat the victor, and then listens to the bear breathe in his face, and destroy the fence, and open his mouth, which Grin fills with the honey he’s always had hidden in his chest.
Then Grin stumbles, dizzy, onto the path of caked earth and stone. And the sun beats down, and the hill is steep, and the Dream is real enough that Grin’s waking self has a hard time breathing as he realizes the Dream is a white pillow and it is morning and it is time to wake up wake up wakeupwakeupwakeupupupupupupupupupupupupupifonlyto remember.
